OUTLINE OF CONTENTS

IMMEDIATE FAMILY
KNOWN ANCESTRY
USISKINS
OBOLERS
THE RIVKE FAMILY
JACOBSONS
ANCESTORS OF KAREN HESSE
PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS & PUBLICATIONS

________________________________

IMMEDIATE FAMILY

I am the only son of my father, Nathan Usiskin, and the third child of my mother, Esther Chukerman, who had two children, Milton and Charles, from her previous marriage to Abe Corn. So I grew up with two older brothers. At the age of 21, Charles changed his surname from Corn to Usiskin to recognize the father who had raised him from the age of 4.

Here is a picture of my own immediate family, taken during Thanksgiving week, 2021.

Ancestry.com DNA’s “Ethnicity Estimate” for me is “100% European Jewish”. This is 100% accurate. Like most Jews, I cannot take my lineage back very far in any ancestral direction, but on three of my four grandparents’s sides, all but the Usiskin side, I can take my lineage back further than most Jews can. Following those three sides is a listing of relevant publications, all self-published and distributed to some or all of the people on the named tree.

KNOWN ANCESTRY

Hillel was likely born around 1845. The name Usiskin is from the small Usisa or Usisha or Usyska river in today’s Belarus that flows through Gorodok north of Vitebsk. My grandfather Schnaer Zalman was born in 1875 in Polotsk, Belarus, north of Vitebsk. He apparently left that family when of age and moved to Riga, where he married my grandmother in 1900, and from which they immigrated to the U.S. and Chicago in 1901.

Latvian records indicate that my ggg-grandfather Avrum was born in 1803/1804.

My ggg-grandfather Mordecai was born around 1775, Velvel around 1805. The name haShochet may never have been taken by Mordecai. It refers to a meat slaughterer which was his profession. The name Tsukerman means “sugar man” and means that the family may have dealt in candies and other sweets. In Polish, the name might be Cukierman. A common English variant is Zukerman or Zuckerman. The name Marinker of my gg-grandfather is a nickname from the crossroads called Malynka (with the “l” pronounced like “r”) that still exists today where Velvel ran an inn. My grandfather Jacob immigrated from near Bialystok, Poland, to New York in 1891 and to Chicago 18 months later, drawn by the World Columbian Exposition.

My ggg-grandfather Meier was born around 1760. The early part of this tree comes primarily from the page of the Sachs Family Album pictured in the JACOBSONS section below. My grandmother Rose immigrated from Mitau to Chicago in 1893 and married Jacob the next year.

USISKINS - Father’s father’s side

Background
Jewish children in the United States are normally given both civil English names and Hebrew names for use in religious services. I was named Zalman Philip (Zalman Feivel) Usiskin after my father’s father and my mother’s aunt Fanny (neé Jacobson) Janow. The founder of the Lubavicher (Habad) Hasid sect of Judaism was Rabbi Shnaer Zalman of Lyady, and any child born in that part of the world with the name Shnaer Zalman would have to be from a Hasid family. My grandfather clearly left that sect because my father did not know of his father’s birth name nor any idea that the family was Hasid.

Story: Growing up, I knew no other person with the name “Zalman” and my family knew no other Usiskins. A man with the name “I. Usiskin” was in the Chicago telephone directory with an indication he was on the grain exchange of the Board of Trade, but he did not live in Chicago and we did not know him. My father would travel for business and look in phone books but he never found anyone else with our surname…until the spring of 1963 when my parents traveled for the first time to Europe and in London there were many Usiskins in the London telephone directory. He made telephone contact and, knowing of my interest in finding other Usiskins, let the London Usiskins know that I would be in London three months later (traveling with the University of Illinois Concert Choir).

I met a number of the London Usiskins at the home of Sidney Usiskin (whose Hebrew name was “Zalman”, and it was by this name that his family called him!) and immediately took down information to build a family tree and determine if and how we were related. I learned that the name “Usiskin” comes from the Usiska river, a small waterway in Belarus that flows through the town of Gorodok north of Vitebsk. And the London Usiskins did have parts of their family in North America. I. Usiskin turned out to be Isadore Usiskin with children in New Jersey. Other Usiskins had homesteaded in Saskatchewan and their descendants were in Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, and Toronto. I would make efforts to meet these families when I gave talks near them.

Over the years I created a tree of this family, so much so that in 1988, stopping overnight in London on my way back to the United States from another international meeting, the London Usiskins threw a party by the London airport in my honor to celebrate my work. Over the years I have met a number of the London Usiskin families, and one family stayed at our home in Winnetka on a visit to the United States, but we have never found a genetic link. DNA shows some links to this family too distant to be able to ascertain the way we might be related and no less distant than tens of thousands of other Jews who have placed their DNA in ancestry.com’s database.

Story. While doing research on the London Usiskin family, I found other Usiskins, and the Ussishkin descendants and cousins of the Zionist Menachem Mendel Ussishkin. When I had five distinct families including my own, I put the material into a small spiral binder and distributed it. Then, in 1995 I learned about Usiskins and Usyskins in Russia and we traveled to St. Petersburg and Moscow to meet them. I continue to keep trees of all the families with my surname and its variants – as many as 17 distinct families but likely all descended from a much smaller number.

Story. In 2018, Konstantin Pimenov, a Russian interested in Jewish genealogy, e-mailed me and directed me to a blog of similarly-interested Russians in which he had posted information (in Russian) about some of the Usiskin/Usyskin families. I sent him my complete file describing 18 Usiskin/Usyskin families and he gave helpful suggestions, in one case connecting two of the families. From his work, he speculates that my great-grandfather Hillel was the son of Abram Mendelovich Usyskin (d. 1857) and Chaya Zalmanovna (b. 1825). Extant records indicate that Abram was the son of Mendel Gilerovich Usyskin (b. 1791, d. 1859) and Basseva Movsheva (b. 1804), so that Mendel was the son of an earlier Hillel (since G’s and H’s are indistinguishable in Russian). Mendel may have been the first to have a surname in addition to a patronym. See https://forum.j-roots.info/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=6628&p=158832&hilit=usiskin#p158832 (a link in Russian but that can be translated with Google translate). I have no way of verifying Konstantin’s work and I still have never found any definitive connection to any of these families. The people I think might be closest relatives do not have their DNA in any of the common databases.

Recent news! In April 2023, I finally learned of relatives on this side who are more distant than my first cousins! Through an extraordinarily close DNA match on myheritage.com, I learned that Polyna Blazer, b. 1926 and living in Berlin, is a 2nd cousin. From the DNA match, Polyna knew immediately how we were related, because her grandmother’s maiden name was Rebecca Usiskina. Specifically, Rebecca was a sister of my grandfather. Polyna’s DNA and the DNA of her niece Jewgenia Kivmann are among the closest matches to me of anyone who has put their DNA online in any database. People in this family found this website online where it is noted (above, in this section) that my great-grandmother Usiskin was named Pesye, and the fact that Polyna was named after Pesye further confirms the match. In June, 2023, Karen and I traveled to Berlin to meet: Polyna; Jewgenia;Vitali Kivmann, Jewgenia’s son; Vitali’s wife Julia; Anna Fourman, Jewgenia’s daughter, who put her and her mother’s and daughter’s DNA online a couple of years ago; and their children Max (who manages Polyna’s account) and Emma Kivmann and Dana Fourman. It is thrilling to find known relatives on my paternal Usiskin side for the first time.

Publications

OBOLERS - Father’s mother’s side

Background
Knowing of my interest in genealogy, in 1973 my father received a tree from Alfred Oboler, of descendants of Avrum Oboler, b. 1806, to pass down to me. Page 1 (of 16) of that tree is shown immediately above. This family tree was created by Oboler descendants in New York at some time after WWII. From it I immediately learned that my grandmother was from a branch of descendants that used the spelling “Obeler”. Ever since, I have kept this tree as up-to-date as I could, including information both about contemporaries and ancestors. For instance, from Latvian censuses and records, we have that Avrum’s wife’s name was Tamara and that he was likely born in 1803 or 1804.

Today two others are involved in this effort: Ed Rappaport and John Cornet. The three of us are descended from three different children of the progenitors Avrum and Tamara; we know of no descendants of a possible fourth child. My version of the Oboler tree, with over 2100 named descendants and spouses, is on my computer and is shared only with family. Ed manages a large tree, including information on all deceased Oboler cousins known to us, at https://www.myheritage.com/site-55717461/rappaport.

Several family trees online assert that Tamara’s surname was Kukla. The three of us who have researched the Oboler family for many years have found no evidence for this, nor has the first person who put this information online (we think in 2020) provided any evidence. Furthermore, birth years of Avrum, Tamara and Gershon suggest that Tamara Kukla could not have been the wife of Avrum.

THE RIVKE FAMILY - Mother’s father’s side

Background
Each month during the school year, on one Sunday evening my parents, brothers, and I would go to a “family meeting”. This was a meeting of the Rivke Family Verband (“verband” means “society” or organization”), a cousins club of the relatives on my grandfather Jacob Chukerman’s side, and it took place in the basement of a synagogue (for many years in the 1950s the K.A.M. temple in Hyde Park, which later became the headquarters of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push). Each meeting of perhaps 50-70 people consisted of milling around before dinner, then a dinner served by four or five of the families, then a formal meeting to discuss family matters at which minutes were taken, and lastly entertainment (a singer or a play or dancing, etc.). It was fun and I looked forward to these meetings. Each year on July 4th there was a picnic, and every five years there was a week-long “jubilee” with a dinner dance and at each jubilee a picture was taken of the entire family, and many of the family had and displayed copies of those pictures in their homes.

The picnic picture from the first Rivke Family Verband Jubilee, July 1935

It was often noted that we members of the Verband were all descendants (or spouses of descendants) of one man, Velvel Marinker, and that the Verband had been organized in 1910 in Chicago because of the death of a cousin named Rivke, who had taken ill while she was pregnant with a second child and died. It was felt that if she had been able to afford medical care, she would not have passed, and so the idea was that in times of need, this club would work to help relatives. And the club helped to bring people over from Europe to the United States.

The older descendants knew how they were descended from Velvel, but younger members like me had no idea how. It was rare for a child to speak up at the formal meeting of the family but on October 12, 1958, at the age of 15, I am mentioned in the minutes of one meeting as having asked for someone to draw up a family tree so that we would all know how we are related. The request was referred to the Executive Committee of the Verband, where it died.

However, several years later that request was answered in part when Jack Garber, who was my age, took up the task of trying to catalog Velvel’s descendants, and presented his findings at the 1965 jubilee. Jack seems to have been overwhelmed by the task and never completed it, and in 1975 he was out of the country, perhaps in the Peace Corps. Furthermore, by this time, the Verband, like many organizations formed by immigrants, was dying. It was still meeting, but only four times a year, and then it lapsed into a coma. From 1967 to 1975 there were no family meetings. But there was still money in the Verband’s treasury, and in 1975 the treasurer of the club, Sam Gluskoter, decided to use the organization’s old mailing list to invite everyone to a picnic on July 4th as was the tradition, and to invite a photographer to take the traditional picture. About eighty people were expected but 177 showed up, the largest number ever to a Rivke Family gathering.

I was sitting at a picnic bench with several of the oldest members of the family – all women – and mentioned my desire to see a family tree of Velvel’s descendants. One of the women explained in her Yiddish-accented English, “It can’t be done.” “They’re all gone.” “No one knows.” “You know who knew? Uncle Max.” (Uncle Max had died decades before.) And then, finally. “It’s very difficult. Cousins married cousins.”

Now imagine me, trained in mathematics. I am faced with a problem that people think is unsolvable. But I think the fact that cousins married cousins makes things easier rather than more difficult, because it closes in the family. Also, the Oboler family tree has shown me an efficient and clear way to display a tree of descendants. And I knew that I could trace myself back to Velvel. Moreover, I was 32 years old at this time, so if I could trace myself back to Velvel, I felt surely the older generation could do the same. Thus creating a tree of descendants of Velvel Marinker was in my mind simply a matter of obtaining information from lots of people. This was like being a mathematics doctoral student and finding the perfect problem to attack – one you think you can solve but others think is too difficult or maybe unsolvable! And so I went home and outlined what I knew: Velvel had 4 children that I knew and there had to be 2 others, and so on…

I made a couple of phone calls to cousins and they all said I should talk to Rose Zukerman, then 84 years old and one of the people at the picnic bench. A month later she and I met for an afternoon and I learned that those who knew the origins of the family were not “all gone”. Rose was an encyclopedia. She was a grandchild of Velvel’s! – I had thought that all from that generation had died. She was born in Bialystok (near where my grandfather was born) and lived in New York, where many of the descendants lived, before marrying her cousin and moving to Chicago (she is the one who remarked that “cousins married cousins”). She told me Velvel’s wife was Chaya Rachel, that they had nine children (!), and gave me the first three generations of the family. It became then only a matter of filling in descendants. Within a year I had an up-to-date hand-written tree of descendants of 8 of the 9 children, including 991 direct descendants and spouses, far more than I had anticipated. I typed some explanation and sent that with the tree to 165 households.

In 1978, “Uncle Max”, whose name was Max Zukerman, and who was in fact an uncle or granduncle to most of the family (!) - as was his younger brother, my grandfather Jacob - reappeared in the form of a translation of stories of his early life in Poland and the founding of the Rivke Family Verband. I volunteered to edit the translation because I hoped it would tell about Velvel Marinker and maybe his ancestors. It did not give me information about Velvel’s upbringing, but it did supply a well-written picture of life in our family in Poland and gave many details about relatives who were already on the family tree.

There have been five editions of the tree (see Publications below). The second edition introduced pictures. The third edition (1986) suggested a tree code for each individual on the tree, and the fourth edition made this explicit. The fifth edition (2000) is a book of “coffee-table” quality, designed by Shira Epstein (a cousin) and written with her help.

I still (2024) keep this tree up to date; it now contains over 2000 direct descendants and their spouses. Of course, I have learned much about the people in this family and also that family stories are often inaccurate. The name “Velvel Marinker” is somewhat like that of “Zorba the Greek”; his civil name was Velvel Garber, that surname having been adopted by 8 of his 9 children. (One son adopted the surname “Echt”, probably to pass as an eldest son of another family so as to avoid conscription into the Russian army.) Marinker is from “Malynka”, a very small crossroads about 20 miles southeast of Bialystok where he and his wife ran an inn. The Rivke after whom the Verband was name was poor but she did not die because she lacked medical attention; she had received immediate medical attention after she tried to abort a child and realized that she had caused herself internal injury.

Having the tree brought the family together and we still meet as the Rivke Family, though our 2020 meeting had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. But there is a family newsletter and website under the direction of Sherri Goldstein. The last edition is likely my last; it will be difficult to duplicate the design work of a cousin Shira Epstein on this book.

Presentation
July 2010: At the 100th anniversary meeting of the Rivke Family Verband. Family History Presentation, viewable at https://vimeo.com/556246040 (1st part) and https://vimeo.com/556246575 (rest)

Publications distributed to family

Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Garber. Loose leaf, 28 pages + appendix of addresses, May 1976.
Editor of Max Zukerman’s “Autobiographical Sketches”, translated from the Yiddish at the Spertus College of Judaica, Softcover, 239 pages, 1979.
Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 2nd edition. Softcover, 84 pages, 1981.
Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 3rd edition. Hardcover, 136 pages, 1986.
Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 4th edition. Hardcover, 186 pages, 2000.
Descendants of Velvel and Chaya Rachel Marinker, A Living Tree. 5th edition. Designed by Shira Epstein. Hardcover, 387 pages, 2010.

Several of these editions, including the latest, can be found in the Family History Library, Salt Lake City, UT. The 5th edition can be found in the library of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois.

JACOBSONS - Mother’s mother’s side

Background
Growing up I knew a number of relatives on my maternal grandmother Rose Jacobson Chukerman’s side. My middle name Philip is after a sister of Rose who passed away the year before my birth. I knew none of her other siblings but did know some cousins who were their children and grandchildren.

Having attempted to work on trees of relatives on my father’s father’s side (Usiskin), with an extensive tree on my father’s mother’s side (Obeler/Oboler), and with the Rivke Family taking care of relatives on my mother’s mother’s side (Chukerman), in the late 1980s I decided to tackle my mother’s mother’s side (Jacobson). I contacted two second cousins on that side, Joan Lowenthal and Bea Sarche Owens and sketched out a tree. It was a large family; even this first tree had over 200 names. I learned that my grandmother was one of 8 children. Five of the 8 had come to Chicago; the other three had remained in Europe and their families had not been heard from since. Their families were ostensibly murdered by the Nazis.

I used JewishGen at www.jewishgen.org when I could to find ancestors from Latvia and Poland, and I put my contact information on that site. So did others, and in July 2003 I saw that a man from Brussels named Jean-Paul Jessé was researching both Jacobsons and Berenshtams from Mitau. Within a day we were trading e-mails. I immediately learned that Rose’s younger sister Dorothea (Dori) Michelson and her family had survived WWII.

Dori – like all of her sisters! – was a musician, an opera singer in Hamburg performing under the name Thea Moll. She had married Julius Michelson, a gynecologist and had three children and moved to Hamburg, Germany. Their first child Hans was brain-damaged from a failed breach birth and died in 1941 of natural causes. Their second child Nina was a concert pianist performing under the name Nina Hamson. Nina lived with and may have married Walter Ruttmann, a noted German impressionist film-maker of the 1920s and 1930s, but was forced to leave Walter when Hitler came to power and asked Walter to assist in filming the rise of the Reich. Walter died from wounds suffered while filming the battle of Stalingrad in 1942/3; Nina was found in Amsterdam by the Nazis and gassed in Auschwitz in 1942. The last of Dori’s children was Gerhart, born in 1907. He was an impressionist painter who had studied in Grenoble in the 1920s but he could not make a living as a painter. He had married Ida Bauch who was pregnant with his child, and from 1931 to 1946 they had seven children.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Michelsons realized they had to leave Germany. The choice was either Chicago, where Dori had 5 siblings, or France, where Gerhart wanted to go. They ultimately moved to a hamlet in the south of France, Montagnac-sur-Auvignon (not to be confused with the much larger Avignon), and this saved their lives during WWII. Jean-Paul met Gerhart and Ida’s third child and eldest daughter Ann in the lycee in nearby Agen, and they fell in love. From age 18 to 24, Jean-Paul lived with the Michelsons, Ann became pregnant, they then married (following the precedent set by her father), and six years later they divorced. In 1965 Ann died with her second husband in an auto accident.

Jean-Paul became a diplomat for the European Union, starting as an ambassador to a nation in the Caribbean and finishing his diplomatic career as ambassador to Israel (even though he was not Jewish). As one reason he could have such a career, he pointed to Gerhart, with whom he had discussed French, German, and English literature and in this family was naturally inculcated into the arts – music, art, and architecture. Wondering how this family become so literate motivated him to learn more about the Michelsons.

In his genealogy work, Jean-Paul found a set of family trees in an album “Familie Sachs” created in the 1930s by Emma Sachs, a member of the Sachs family in Riga who realized that, if the family did not survive an oncoming war, the only evidence of their existence might be a set of trees accompanied by pictures and signatures of family members. The Jakobson tree from this album is shown below. On it, towards the far right, as descendants of Rosa, are my mother (mistakenly written as Natty rather than the more likely meant “Hetty”). Also, my mother’s first husband and children are mistakenly attributed to her sister Annie. But these errors do not detract from the extraordinary effort that went into this work. The original album is in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. I have a full copy. The Jakobsohn tree brought my knowledge of the paternal Jakobsohn line back into the 18th century.

In 2014 I received an e-mail from a man I didn’t know, Andrei Makarov. He had seen a family tree on Myheritage.com – I think from Ed Rappaport – and announced that he was a great-great-grandchild of another of Rose’s siblings, her older brother Herman. Herman had migrated east to Russia, not west to the United States, and his children lived in Moscow. The Nazis had come very close to Moscow but had not conquered that city, so this was a second family that survived the war. In 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, Andre’s father was on the government payroll in the middle of a 5-year stint in England dealing with exports. The family simply stayed on in England rather than return to Russia. Andrei then threw in a tidbit – his grandmother Irina Tenson Jacobsohn, was alive at the age of 99 and lived with his parents Yuri and Natalia Makarov (not the famous ballet dancer) in London. I asked, “Does Irina speaks English?” I was told “Yes” because she was educated in British schools for 10 years during Russian revolution times. Not long after receiving Andrei’s e-mail I had a conference in England and Karen and I were at the Makarov home in London and met the entire family and spoke with Irina. She had the accent of royalty, the “King’s English”. A joy of being a genealogist!

Andrei is also very much into genealogy, also on Myheritage.com, and he informed me that the family of the eldest of Rose’s sisters, the third family that did not come to the United States, also survived the war but they have no living descendants.

Publications

Descendants, Forebears, and Relatives of Sara Berenstam and Moses Wulf Jacobsohn. Spiral bound, 43 pages, August 2004. Revised with thanks to Jean-Paul Jesse, 2005.
Descendants, Forebears, and Relatives of Sara Berenstam and Moses Wulf Jacobsohn from Mitau, Courland, Russia. Spiral bound, 48 pages, 2009.

ANCESTORS OF KAREN HESSE

Ancestry.com DNA estimates Karen’s biological ancestry as 59% England and Northeastern Europe, 25% Scotland – specifically NE Scotland, Moray, and the Northern Islands, 7% Germanic Europe, 5% Sweden & Denmark, and 4% Norway. From genealogical research done first by Karen’s mother Janet Miller Hesse and then expanded back by me, her geographic ancestry is diverse, agreeing with the DNA: 5/16 from England – religiously, 1/4 is Protestant and 1/8 Quaker, 1/4 from Scotland – Episcopal, and in fact some from the Moray area), 1/16 from Ireland and Catholic, and 5/16 German – from the state of Hesse, in which 1/4 is religiously Catholic and 1/16 was born Jewish with no evidence of having kept his religion in adulthood.

Records from England are reasonably reliable back to the 1500s and lines of Karen’s ancestry can be traced back with some confidence to that century. They include William Shreve, who seems to me to be the first Quaker to come to the United States, and whose son Thomas Sheriff was born in Little Compton, Rhode Island, around 1624. This is two decades before William Penn, widely mentioned as the first Quaker to come to America. There are two possible explanations for this contradictory information. Penn’s sailing was a public event; he sailed with permission of the King of England to settle in America and his ship contained only Quakers. Or perhaps William Shreve converted to being a Quaker after coming to the United States. Karen’s German ancestors came to the United States and Chicago with the large German migration in the third quarter of the 19th century. Her Scottish ancestors came first to Canada and then to Chicago in the last quarter of the 19th century.

PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS & PUBLICATIONS

Presentations

At monthly meetings of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois:
May, 2002: Writing and Distributing a Family Tree
February, 2015: Making a Family Tree Coffee Table Book
December, 2018: Stories about Things I’ve Learned from Doing Genealogy
August, 2019: More Stories about Things I’ve Learned from Doing Genealogy

To Sunday morning group, Lakeside Congregation, Highland Park, Illinois:
February, 2017: Things I’ve Learned from Doing Genealogy – Family Stories My Parents and Relatives Didn’t Tell Me
December, 2017: Finding Relatives Over the Years

Publications

“My mother had five names”, in Morasha, newsletter of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois, Fall 2020, pp. 6-7.
“The Hillel Foundation Choir”, in Chicago Jewish History, newsletter of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, Winter 2022, pp. 10-11.